On the road: One woman's quest to meet all her Facebook friends

Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune

ArLynn Leiber Presser, left, joins her Facebook friend Cynthia Dillon Monday, August 8, 2011 for a ride through Glencoe in Dillon's Fifties-era Steib sidecar, attached to a 1965 BMW motorcycle driven by Dillon. Presser is on a mission to meet up with 325 of her Facebook friends.

ArLynn Leiber Presser, left, joins her Facebook friend Cynthia Dillon Monday, August 8, 2011 for a ride through Glencoe in Dillon's Fifties-era Steib sidecar, attached to a 1965 BMW motorcycle driven by Dillon. Presser is on a mission to meet up with 325 of her Facebook friends. (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune)

As 2011 dawned, ArLynn Leiber Presser made a New Year's resolution: Somehow, she would get face-to-face with every one of her 325 Facebook friends, over the next 365 days, across three continents.

The reason? In the language of Facebook, "It's complicated" — even more so for Presser than for the typical Facebook friend.

A former attorney, Presser had divorced after 23 years of marriage, much of which she spent cocooned in her Winnetka home, writing more than two dozen novels (most under the pen name Vivian Leiber), while raising sons Eastman, a 19-year-old student at Oberlin College, and Joseph, 23, a filmmaker and animator in New York City.

Now, at 50, she was beginning what she calls "the second lap" of life, burdened by a disorder with roots in the first. Given up for adoption just before her third birthday, she endured a rocky childhood with her adoptive family and, later, in foster care. At 19, she began having panic attacks in public places, a condition known as agoraphobia. Her world had steadily shrunk to a safe swath of Chicago's suburbs.

"It's easy working at home to end up not ever leaving your house, but thinking you're having a wonderful social life," Presser said, "and it's all through Facebook — 'I must have a perfectly normal social life because I have all these friends and they send me funny pictures and play Mafia Wars and Sorority Life' — and you really just start thinking you're part of a community."

But friending isn't the same as bonding. Presser decided to explore which was which in her own world, touching on one of the universal questions of the social media age.

Not to pile on the pressure, but Presser's challenge was ambitious for another reason. She had never met roughly 15 percent of her Facebook friends, many of whom she had connected with via online Scrabble or a shared affection for her grandfather Fritz Leiber's science fiction writing.

For the average Facebook user, that figure (of exclusively online friends) is about 7 percent, according to survey findings from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.

"By and large those who use Facebook do so to support and maintain existing networks of friends and family," said Pew senior research specialist Mary Madden. "With online friends that we become close to, there's a natural human instinct, when a relationship gets to a certain point, of wanting to meet that person."

Presser estimates another 15 percent of her Facebook friends were people she hadn't seen in more than a decade — "classmates, long-lost cousins, former neighbors."

"The rest are people I should pay more attention to in my life," she said.

Network of support

When she announced her endeavor to loved ones and acquaintances, they were supportive — her ex-husband gave her his frequent-flier miles; nearly every Facebook friend agreed to meet her — but skeptical.

Many feared, at best, that she would abandon her resolution by February, and, at worst, she would return from one of her Facebook encounters in such a state that "a three-part 'CSI' miniseries would be devoted to it," she recounted on her blog, arlynnpresser.wordpress.com.

Just past the midyear mark, Presser has lived to tell about more than half of her "Face to Facebook" meetings so far, blogging and posting videos, such as the surprise ending to her Museum of Sex rendezvous in Manhattan with 20-something friend Richard "Mop" Furniss and her one-day stay in Mexico City, where she flew to meet 40-year-old actor Yoshi Maeshiro.

In adventures closer to home, Gretchen Miller Neuman, editor of VinoVerve.com and owner of Good Grapes wine shop in Glencoe, taught Presser the art of cracking open a Champagne bottle with a saber. Jo Caylor, 75, had her gasping for air at a Zumba class for senior citizens.

Building up to her most daunting challenge, Presser is determined to breathe life into — and out of — a round-the-world trip in October to meet Facebook friends in India, Alaska, the Philippines and elsewhere, if all goes as planned.

Of course, it doesn't always.

In Manhattan, Furniss confessed that the black female rapper-friend InDaLoop, whom Presser was scheduled to meet later the same day, was really his own alter ego.

An online Scrabble partner she was to meet in San Diego, pleading "walking pneumonia," asked her to come to his home — alone — instead.

"I kind of understood there would be people who would turn out to be not my real friend. I also firmly expected, and it has happened, that I've found out things I don't really want to know," Presser said. "And I've found out people are far better friends than I ever knew."

Often, there's magic in the mundane.

Presser and Mary McManus, who lives outside Boston, friended each other on Facebook after Presser's son Joseph did a documentary on McManus' Boston Marathon journey with post-polio syndrome. They bonded after their first face-to-face meeting, in which McManus learned Presser, like she, is a Rotarian; Rotary is working to end polio.

"I came away knowing I have a beautiful new friendship in my life which continues to grow," McManus said.

Since the start of the year, Presser has gained about 1,200 Facebook friends (but is not tacking them onto her itinerary). She has also gained 5 pounds, blowing one of her other New Year's resolutions (again).

With a "fearless means flexible" mantra, she carries on.

"The further I get into this, the harder it is to weasel out," she said.

Winning the battle

Jill Shaffer, a clinical psychologist, recovered agoraphobe and founder of CalmConnection.com, applauds Presser's social experiment. Agoraphobes typically avoid public places where they feel escape may be difficult or where they have had a panic attack previously. Most don't tell anyone of their disorder for fear of being considered a hypochondriac, Shaffer said, and most don't know it can be overcome.

Presser has suffered setbacks. She has been defriended by a few Facebook friends, and has depleted much of her savings, some from her years as a self-described "spectacularly bad" commercial litigator.

"I may very well run out of money, but it somehow keeps dropping in my lap about the time I think I'm going broke," she said. "I came back from LA worried about how I was going to fund my next trip, and it turned out some royalties from a Fritz Leiber book showed up."

She shares those royalties with her biological father, Justin Leiber. He, too, is a Facebook friend, whom she first tracked down through a private detective when she was 25. For her Facebook experiment, she traveled last winter to see him in Tallahassee, where he is a philosophy professor and writer.

A video post from that trip shows Presser retreating to a bathroom after her father guided her through the photos in his office; not one was of her or her sons. "I thought I was coming here because, well, yeah, he's my Facebook friend, but I thought I was his daughter," Presser says tearfully in the video. "He is just a guy who has a family, and I'm not part of that family."

Other Facebook friends, however, are watching over her. One, a 28-year-old soldier named Capt. Reggie Gholston, has accompanied her on two trips, including to Mexico City, out of concern for her safety.

Another, Landon Jones, an author and former managing editor of People magazine, sent her a stuffed version of his own Facebook alter ego, Capt. William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, after she visited him in Princeton, N.J. (She met Jones, author of "William Clark and the Shaping of the West," at a lecture at Northwestern University four years ago.) Presser now takes her miniature fellow explorer with her on her Facebook journeys.

"As I told her," Jones said, "it's good to know that she has an armed military man at her side."

This summer, independent filmmaker Ben Gonzales, a Facebook friend Presser met through one of her sons, began documenting her travels and raising money to produce the film. (See a trailer on f2fb.net.)

"Obviously ArLynn's situation is unique," Gonzales said. "But I also think there are a lot of people who don't have that kind of history who are dealing with these kinds of anxiety issues. Lots never get therapy, they just muddle through. I've convinced her that what she's doing is not just for herself. The appeal is very broad. That, and it's about Facebook. It's something that's reshaping society in a way that we really don't know yet."

It has reshaped Presser already.

"I've always thought everyone else was tooling around, being happy, without a care in the world, and, boy, am I wrong," she said. "It's amazing to me some of the things people tell me about how they negotiate their days. This whole thing has made me realize I'm a little bit more normal than I thought."

ArLynn Leiber Presser offers this advice on turning an exclusively virtual friendship into a real, live, face-to-face one — in a public place, by all means.

Think about shared interests and activities. "Both of you like the band OK Go?" Presser said. Get tickets to the next concert and send a message to see if your friend wants to go. Or maybe you both like chess. "Suggest a meet-up at a coffee shop with a wager of winner-buys-dessert. A shared activity smooths awkwardness."

If your friend lives in another city, make it casual. "I will be in Your Town next week; any chance we could have lunch either Wednesday or Thursday?" That's less intimidating than "I am coming to see you … yes, you!" Presser said. "Flexibility about time is a must."

Never suggest that your Facebook friend meet you for the first time (in a long time or ever) in their own home or yours. "It's dangerous and uncool," she said.

If you have a mutual friend, it's nice to include the friend in the invitation.

Before meeting, review your friend's profile. "Remind yourself of the children's names or whether your friend is still married — not that you're going to spout off all the details of your friend's life like a stalker, but you at least won't ask the question, 'So is Trixie married?' and be told, 'No, Trixie, our dog, is not, in fact, married.' "

— W.D.

Friending with benefits

What Presser has learned from friends and former friends on Facebook:

After her breakup: Presser and ex-husband Stephen amicably agreed to not only defriend each other but also to block each other on Facebook, as they smilingly explain in a video post on her blog: "I didn't want to know everything you were up to," Stephen says. Adds ArLynn: "You can be friends in real life and not necessarily on Facebook."

Friendship in perspective: Janie Gibson, one of Presser's Facebook friends (through son Joseph), says in a video on Presser's blog that her mother always told her, "Friendship is like a pie; every person makes up a piece. Some are bigger than others, some are smaller." Just aim for a complete pie, Gibson said.

Defriending vs. deactivating: Sometimes Facebook friends deactivate their account temporarily, for personal reasons such as a romantic breakup. Presser learned not to assume she had been "defriended." "I totally could see how I might deactivate my account at the end of this journey just for a week or so," she said. "I will need it."